Pausing for reath at fresh & easy (Tesco’s USA stores) We’ve opened 31 stores in 66 days so far this year…now we’re pausing for breath… However, after opening our first 50, we planned to have a 3 month break from openings, and other than a couple more in Phoenix, we’re taking it (albeit, in our […]
Tesco is opening Fresh and Easy stores in the USA: starting with Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas. Tesco is the third largest retailer in the world and well known for using lean management methods. I added Tesco to my long term stock picks last year (and Warren Buffett owns about $2 billion […]
Lean Provision Is Tesco’s Secret Weapon in Battle with Wal-Mart (annoyingly Yahoo has deleted that web page so I removed the link) (update again here is the LEI press release): Tesco’s lean provision system combines point-of-sale data, cross-dock distribution centers, and frequent deliveries to many stores along “milk-runs” to stock the right items in a […]
What innovation means to Tesco [the broken link was removed] by Sir Terry Leahy (Chief Executive of Tesco): Innovators are all around us; innovation is after all just another word for an idea and we can all have those. Businesses must learn to harness the creativity of their workforce and encourage staff to come forward […]
Management Advice Failures – It is amazing to me how often we accept non-solutions. If someone objects that we have tried that “solution” and it didn’t work they are often shut down with a version of: “don’t be negative” or “I don’t want to hear we tried that before and it didn’t work” (we are […]
Low inventory levels do not mean failing to have products available for customers. Now, if you manufacturing in huge batches and can’t respond to customer feedback then it might mean failure to predict customer demand does mean failure to deliver. But lean thinking has shown how to avoid this problem. People need to adopt lean […]
Dr. Deming encouraged the use of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle to improve. Agile Management encourages a similar mindset – to test out ideas in practice and adapt quickly. A key to both strategies is to quickly iterate over possible solutions. Tesco provides an example of this strategy: This was our first opening since we took our […]
curiouscat.com > Curious Cat Management Improvement > Management Blog > Archive Most popular posts – 2004 posts – 2005 – 2006 – 2007 April 2008 Detailed Monthly Archive 24: Toyota Canada CIO on Genchi Genbutsu and Kaizen 22: Deming and Performance Appraisal 21: Find Joy and Success in Business 18: The Defect Black Market 17: Gary Convis is the New […]
With Microsoft’s offer for Yahoo I am replacing Yahoo with Danaher in the 12 Stocks for 10 Years portfolio. Other stocks in the portfolio include Google up 137% since purchased, PetroChina up 132%, Amazon up 106% and Toyota up 44%. I have considered Danaher since creating the portfolio and now looks like an attractive time […]
curiouscat.com > Curious Cat Management Improvement > Management Blog > Archive Most popular posts – 2004 posts – 2005 – 2006 – 2008 December 2007 Detailed Monthly Archive 29: Communicating Change 26: Carnival of Human Resources #23 24: Bigger Impact: 15 to 18 mpg or 50 to 100 mpg? 18: Management Improvement Carnival #25 17: Deming Companies 14: Great Visual Instruction […]